Thursday, May 12, 2005

A fairly lite article, but I agree with the following description of what defines a conservative:

Comfort with contradictionI mean this in the broadestmetaphysical sense and the narrowest practical way. Think of any leftishideology and at its core you will find a faith that circles can be closed,conflicts resolved. Marxism held that in a truly socialist society,contradictions would be destroyed. Freudianism led the Left to the idea that theconflicts between the inner and outer self were the cause of unnecessaryrepressions. Dewey believed that society could be made whole if we jettisoneddogma and embraced a natural, organic understanding of the society whereeveryone worked together. This was an Americanized version of a Germany idea,where concepts of the Volkgeist — spirit of the people — had been elevated tothe point where society was seen to have its own separate spirit. All of thiscomes in big bunches from Hegel who, after all, had his conflicting thesis andantithesis merging into a glorious thesis. (It’s worth noting that WhittakerChambers said he could not qualify as a conservative — he called himself a “manof the right” — because he could never jettison his faith in the dialecticalnature of history.)

But move away from philosophy and down to earth. Liberals and leftists areconstantly denouncing “false choices” of one kind or another. In ourdebate, Jonathan Chait kept hinting, hoping, and haranguing that — one day — wecould have a socialized healthcare system without any tradeoffs of any kind.Environmentalists loathe the introduction of free-market principles into thepolicy-making debate because, as Steven Landsburg putsit, economics is the science of competing preferences. Pursuing some goodthings might cost us other good things. But environmentalists reject the veryidea. They believe that all good things can go together and that anythingsuggesting otherwise is a false choice.

Listen to Democratic politicians when they wax righteous about social policy. Invariably it goes something like this: “I simply reject the notion that in a good society X should have to come at the expense of Y.” X can be security and Y can be civil liberties. Or X can be food safety and Y can be the cost to the pocketbook of poor people. Whatever X and Y are, the underlying premise is that in a healthy society we do not have tradeoffs between good things. In healthy societies all good things join hands and walk up the hillside singing I’d like to buy the world a coke.

Think about why the Left is obsessed with hypocrisy and authenticity. The former is the great evil, the latter the closest we can get to saintliness. Hypocrisy implies a contradiction between the inner and outer selves. That’s a Freudian no-no in and of itself. But even worse, hypocrisy suggests that others are wrong for behaving the way they do. Hypocrites act one way and behave another. Whenever a conservative is exposed as a “hypocrite” the behavior — Limbaugh’s drug use, Bennett’s gambling, whatever — never offends the Left as much as the fact that they were telling other people how to live. This, I think, is in part because of the general hostility the Left has to the idea that we should live in any way that doesn’t “feel” natural. We must all listen to our inner children.